Study: Websites Managin...

Survey measures tags from ads, analytics, email and social media firms.

Social Media Gurus Push...

This is a guest post by Roger Warner of Content and Motion . Here’s classic example of how badly some companies are screwing up on social media. Back in February this year Coca-Cola Australia invited its fans to some ‘banter’ or chat. Fans obliged. Much fun ensued. Coca-Cola looked stupid. What’s happening here? Coca Cola has invested tirelessly in its brand for the past 50 years. Now some bright social media spark is conducting inane ‘little experiments’ for social media ‘engagement’ that seem hellbent on killing it. Exactly the same thing can happen when young startups try to engage on social networks and think they have to “engage”. Sadly, Coca Cola’s approach to engagement is not the exception, it’s the rule. It’s the “Hi, how was your weekend?” approach to brand communications on Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Plenty of tech companies find themselves in this trap, not just consumer brands. This is classic conversational, open and ‘authentic’ dialogue that seems to satisfy the pervasive ethos of social media (make nice) but at the same time totally messes with any concept of a brand. It can vastly over estimate the average person’s appetite for holding conversations with the products and services they use and follow on Facebook. Startups, companies and brands that are following this path are getting it very wrong indeed. • People don’t use Facebook in order to forge a relationship with Coca-Cola (or any other brand). They use it to create and enhance relationships with other people and to tell their own life stories (via sharing). • People believe in brands. Some folks buy the Burberry label instead of Wallmart own brand and are very happy with the price tag. Bland conversations and banter undermine the strength of a brand (and price) because they’re reductive: they strip out the magic and create a level playing field. Any brand can play the ‘authenticity’ game. • Whichever way you look at it – entertainment, engagement, acquisition, etc – brand to fan conversations don’t scale well (whereas fan to fan conversations do). Resource runs thin and they revert to standard types. “Hi, how was your weekend?” • People are tuning out from mundane ‘experiments’ and boring, self-serving brand ‘conversations’. They simply don’t compete in a news stream that includes raunchy pictures from Friday’s drinks at the office. Further, it’s more fun to sabotage them than to play along. So what else should you be doing on Facebook? Great ‘social brands’ enhance the ‘personal brands’ of their fans. Put bluntly: You make them look better. They transform the average stuff of life into something more valuable and meaningful. They create stories to share by giving people great content and experiences that makes them feel smarter, cooler, more generous and generally more heroic. The will to empower creates the will to share. The winners in this game know that any given Facebook play must be geared to creating (relative) fame and/or thanks for others. And they understand that if they can do this, then good things will follow: shares, Likes, comments and, in turn, brand awareness, traffic and referrals. In the near term future, these brands will flourish in the Social sphere – they’ll generate a tangible benefit from their spend and their Social Media teams will earn more respect, industry awards and money. Their work will evolve around a firm but basic understanding of what people really want from their time on Social Media – kudos. They’ll be able to extend the brand in new engaging ways by creating lots of very personal missions on new platforms and devices, in all kinds of day-to-day environments that they don’t currently enjoy a presence – from the breakfast table to desk to couch and back again. Success – and a more powerful Social brand – comes via an understanding of how, why and where a brand can generate personal kudos in amongst the flux of daily life and leveraging the best technology available to make it easy and support the cause. Here are some great examples: • Create an email intervention in the workplace? Sure. I’m a smart working hero, I’m in . • Deliver a can of personalised chicken soup to a flu-bound spouse? I’m a progressive, caring husband with a sense of humour. Show me how . • Wage a war against over priced, over specced shave tech (and Roger Federer)? I’ve always thought seven blades was pointless. Where do I sign ? And, for those still bouncing around with the banter, here’s three closing tips for the immediate future: • Rewire for social. Your biggest ideas must be about them, not you. • Start trying to make your fans’ life stories more heroic. • The will to empower creates the will to share. Do this and you will win on Facebook and most other Social Media channels… and I guarantee it’s a hell of a lot more ‘engaging’ than banter.

Silverpop launches Soci...

Silverpop, the digital marketing technology provider, has released Social Pull, an app that helps marketers build online forms for Facebook Timeline pages, said Adam Steinberg, segment marketing director of social media for Silverpop.

43 Facebook Pages Have ...

What has 4,177,653 Facebook followers, 245,839 Twitter followers, 1,018 YouTube subscribers, 294,467 Google+ fans, but only  67 followers on Pinterest? * The answer is Amazon.com! Those combined numbers landed them in the number one slot on Campalyst’s Top 250 Internet Retailers on Social Media index . The index is proof that not all social media is created equal and that’s a good lesson for everyone. Amazon is rocking Facebook, but there are more than 50 companies on the list that beat them on YouTube. As for Pinterest, no one is pulling astronomical numbers but several companies are created a nice little fanbase there. The infographic Campalyst created to go with the index shows that nearly all 250 companies use Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube (90%). 67% are using Google+, which isn’t bad, but I have to wonder if they’re keeping them up or if they’re doing them any good. 61% are already on Pinterest and that’s kind of an elbow to the eye of Google+. Facebook has the strongest social media pages thanks to their age (by social media standards, they’re the grandfather of the bunch) and their associated advertising options. Here’s another slice from the Campalyst infographic. Overall, the Top 250 list is populated with companies you’d expect like Amazon, Staples, Walmart and Dell. But the list also has a few lesser known quantities that are making strides, like iHerb with 329 Pinterest followers (more than Kohl’s) and ThinkGeek with more than 44,000 YouTube subscribers. If you’re a small business owner, don’t let these numbers get you down. These top companies have plenty of help when it comes to running to their social media channels. If you’re a company of ten or less, concentrate on building up Facebook and a second channel that speaks to your audience. There’s no sense driving yourself crazy trying to update Pinterest or YouTube if your customers don’t hang out there. You can see the full Top 250 Internet Retailers on Social Media index and infographic when you visit Campalyst online. *Data is based on numbers on the day the index was created and have changed since then. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

The Importance Of Socia...

If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American history. Despite the hype over follower counts, a new study shows that there’s no credible evidence that Twitter can be used to predict how elections will turn out. “It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated,” writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello, in an unusually strident rant (for an academic). Gayo’s conclusions are intuitive: social media users are an unrepresentative slice of voters, and tweets may not accurately reflect how voters behave. And, his principles apply not to just Twitter, but to all social media. In reality, much of a candidate’s social media “fans” are a composition of individuals who are not swayed by campaigns: reliable supporters, opposition spectators, and the growing army of non-voting 20-somethings. Let’s look at the numbers: Paul has five times more Facebook fans than Rick Santorum (950K vs. 189K) and about 50% of the current front runner, Mitt Romney (1.67M). Yet, Santorum narrowly lost to Romney, and Paul lost by a landslide to both. In other words, the number of social media followers has little correlation with electoral wins. Aware that raw follower count is an empty campaign asset, social scientists have attempted to analyze whether social media “sentiment,” or tone of the discussion, can reveal how much a candidate is liked, and therefore which candidate would win an election. According to arguably the top social media analytics firm in the industry, Crimson Hexagon, Paul outperformed all of his conservative counterparts as measured by total volume of Twitter mentions. Twitter chatter around Paul was of 26% of the total political conversation in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, while, Mitt Romney, the actual winner, had 22%. Paul, too, had a slight popularity advantage, with relatively more positive comments about him then his duller opponent (12% positive and 14% negative for Paul vs. 9% positive vs. 13% negative for Romney) Why is social media such a false temptress for campaigns? First, Twitter is largely a shouting match among a small percentage of of hyper-vocal users: 50% of the most influential tweets are produced by the top 0.05% of users and most users are inactive [PDF]. And, the lopsided political demographic of Internet users doesn’t end with Twitter. For instance, the legalization of marijuana continues to haunt President Obama whenever he’s asked questions from an Internet audience (whether on YouTube or through the giggly Twitter representative of Jimmy Fallon ). And, while, yes, the war on drugs is an important issue to discuss (read: please don’t send me hate mail), we get the false sense from the Internet community that legalizing marijuana is more pressing than the combined threat of a recession, terrorism, a broken education system, and a nuclear-armed Iran. In other words, the “vocal minority” drowns out the voices of the “silent majority.” Second, while young people dominate social media, they vote in negligible numbers. “If no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two: Indiana and North Carolina,” write Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser in How Barack Obama Won. More than any other generation in the past century, Gen Y is inundated with a peculiar brand of politically engaged, non-voting citizen , who would rather pitch a tent in Zuccotti park than schlep to a polling booth on election day (side note: are you listening Occupy Wall Street?! This is why the Tea Party is kicking your political butt). So, when election day comes around, arm yourself with some healthy skepticism against amateur statisticians stoking the social media hype. For example, In 2010, the Facebook politics page put out a misleading post, “ Facebook Fans Help Predict More Than 70% of Key Races .” The statistic is technically true, but correlation does not equal causation. Politicians with more Facebook fans are likely more popular with voters anyways, not because they had a crack social media team who could boost their fan count. Additionally, while 81% of Senate candidates with more Facebook fans did win their race, 83% of incumbents also won re-election. Incumbents are simply more popular, both because they have the advantage of political office and because opponents want to follow their social media feeds by “fanning” their page. In this case, Facebook fans are paraded around as a key variable, when, in fact, Facebook fans are likely a symptom of popularity, not the cause. This isn’t to say that social media is an inconsequential player in the political landscape. Candidate Barack Obama did more than broadcast press releases in 140 character chunks; he engaged fans, pioneered tools for organizing, and inspired a culture of viral artistry. However, since 2008, the world hasn’t seen much in the way of election innovation. Ultimately, it isn’t who’s listening, but who’s acting. [Top image via researchgirl/Flickr .]